Re: Feature Request - to save space when not using zip format

[FurtahPrepGuy]

I've been using your tool to convert all my bootable USB drives that contain various tools (MEM Testers, BIOS updaters, Secure Erasers, Rescue Utils, etc, etc - there are a million of these) to IMG files that I then slap on a huge USB stick running Ventoy; which can reboot into any of them. The clutter of USB sticks has been vanquished! But another clutter remains...space clutter. Ventoy can't use IMZ files so I must use the regular IMG format. When the original stick used is 16 GB (or 32, or 64, or even 128) the IMG file produced is VERY wasteful. One can resize the data partition on these sticks with another tool so that only the required space is allocated to said partition and then leave the rest of the drive empty, but there is no option in your tool (when creating an image) to cease writing when the rest of the drive is empty. THAT would be exceedingly handy, as, for example, a 16 GB MEMTEST thumb drive really only needs a < 1 GB partition to function. Now on your webpage I know you talk about not wanting to wade into dealing with sub-drive structures (partitions and file systems), but in this case you'd help save people a lot of space (and write time) if you waded a teeny bit into it at the partition level. If the drive is MBR or GPT (which should cover 99.99% of use cases) you could make a few simple queries to the partition table structure and determine the last byte used on the drive; then create another option in your options section to "Ignore empty space at end of drive when imaging". Yes, this would not cover exotic cases like drives that are not MBR/GPT or drives containing data outside of declared partitions, but you could warn people this might not work just like you do for your similarly functioning "Truncate" option. Also, backup GPT partition info is--by standard--located in the last sectors of a drive, so you'd have to relocate or recreate that as well with this option. But all-in-all doesn't sound tooo hard to accomplish and I guarantee people will love you for it. I will.

[FurtahPrepGuy]

Thinking about this some more, I'd say you could roll this into the existing "Truncate" option with maybe some rewording.
If this option is checked then it would affect the existing use case of:
"What happens when I restore a larger image (but with empty space at end) to a smaller drive"
and my use case of:
"What happens when I backup a drive and don't want to image the empty part of the drive after the last partition"
In both cases you'd do some quick lookup of partition info to find the last sector you need to deal with, then STOP reading the source after that.
Maybe call this combined option "Stop reading source after last partition", or the previous terminology I suggested, "Ignore empty space at end of drive when imaging".
And it solves BOTH problems and makes life easier for the user.

[FurtahPrepGuy]

This is, of course, referring only to when the user employs Device Mode imaging (which is most times).